Hey Zero,
I agree that we shouldn't wait for the 400 cards before translation starts
We can do both, start translating and also keep expanding the core set.
ngoeminne wrote: ↑Wed Jan 09, 2019 10:18
Is Snowdrop still around?
Who are the founders? Where are they?
Yep, snowdrop is still around. The other members of the original wtactics team are in a winter sleep.
At the time I joined the wtactics project in januari 2016. The project was nearly dead, all devs had abandoned it, the resources were everywhere (artwork was here and there on ftp, wiki, github, bazar, dropbox) and the infrastructure was infested with worms (the forum, wiki, website). The old card database was gone, and the cardscape and sandscape were borken. It didn't look good at all.
I decided to contact snowdrop and see if we could revive it some how. I went trough all the forum posts and tried to do a post-mortem analysis on why things were so bad. Basically I concluded it was mainly due to lack of setting small achievable goals and a focus on a stable ruleset and playable decks.
Then I took the liberty to distill a ruleset (Awesome Rules Concept) from all the ideas and made it stable. At the same time I started to gather the artwork back in one place (github). And made contact with some of the previous devs, snowdrop,Mat, Ravenchild, Xarn,Q_X and they were willing to help out in giving me access and as much as temp/working files they could, but also indicated they didn't want to take up a major role any longer. After that they went silent (except for snowdrop).
Next thing was to setup the infrastructure again, we cleaned the wiki, forum, and wtatics website.
I found that during the wtatcis days, a lot (to much) of effort went in discussions about templating, coloring, typography, print quality, etc... instead of getting play test decks ready, so we set up a small goal: creating two decks that can compete. Meanwhile new people were slowly coming back to the project: Peter, Clemens, Louis, Pistos to name a few.
So our next goal was creating two playable decks. I soon realized that creating cards by hand was impossible to do with the limited number of people willing to help. Copy-past and design each card in inkscape or scribus or whatever wouldn't work. And it is hard to keep in sync, and let other people work on things that were already there. So I made a card generation tool and integrated that with an online database (aminduna).
We started to use the huge artwork collection, and Santi went back in created missing artwork for the two decks.
By the end of 2016 we had done it : a stable ARC rule set and two decks: "Gaian love for life" and "Uneasy Alliance". At that time I wanted to (pre-)release it, and I discussed that with snowdrop (the orignal founder of wtactis). He felt that it could not be released under the wtactics name, as it wasn't the Original Rule Concept he started (but not finished by then - it is now), while I felt it was a must, it was the first time the project could deliver something in 7 years, and a huge milestone and a very important mindset: we can deliver, the project hasn't failed.
As snowdrop wanted to hold on to the ORC rules, we agreed that we'd transform wtaticts into a place for cooperation about ideas, discussions and shared resources, while still giving the freedom for each team ARC/ORC to go ahead on their own space and time. So we created gaia.li (orc ruleset) and arcmage.org (ARC ruleset).
So the arcmage team progressed and in 2017 we worked out small issues with the rules, the release candidate cards, and made a simple online web browser based game to play-test. We also started with creating new decks for the other factions: Peter had some ideas about an empire deck, Clemens started the toll of time deck, Louis created his Uprising Deck and I worked on the Shadow deck.
In 2018 Alex joined us and done something amazing: sold his magic collection to fund artwork. So now snowdrop Ales and me are funding the artwork (thanks to snowdrop we already had a large collection, but now we could extend it with the missing artwork for arcmage as well).
By august 2018 we had the six decks ready, had designed a box, started on a rules leaflet, and Pistos and Marieke edited and re-edited and reviewed and reviewed the cards until they were ready to pint.
November 2018 saw the first release of arcmage with the six decks in a real (hand crafted box). We ordered 20 copies, and there is only one in stock. The release led to a small player-base in Belgium (besides my play test buddies). And our numbers are slowly increasing on our discord channel.
We owe much to the original developers of wtatics and in particular to snowdrop, Q_x, Mattiah, xarn and Ravenchild and we thank them for all their effort.
I did reach try to reach out them (by mail) but didn't got any replies. It could be that they didn't find the forum after it was moved to arcmage.org and that we changed IRC for discord, or that they left when the old wtaticts site went down. (It was really beyond repair). In any case I credited them as correctly as possible.
https://arcmage.org/credits
That's the story, so far,
Kind regards,
Nico